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MarshallCavendish - Wee Cheng Tan

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177 pages

English

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He visits a bizarre flower-show in Pyongyang, crosses confusing ethno-religious fault lines in the Balkans and Lebanon, drinks tea with friendly Yemenis near Osama bin Laden's ancestral village, explores prehistoric caves with Tuareg tribesmen in Libya, and plays Indiana Jones among pyramids shortly after a rebel attack on Khartoum. Through long-forgotten characters, bizarre coincidences of history and personal stories of individuals he encountered, Wee Cheng turns faraway lands alive, and convinces the reader that these are more than just places in the news.

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Asia

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Publié par	MarshallCavendish
Date de parution	01 septembre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789812619693
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Cover art by Opal Works Co. Limited
Design by Rachel Chen
Copyright © 2009 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Reprinted 2010
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial road, Singapore 536196
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300, Fax: (65) 6285 4871. E-mail: genref@sg.marshallcavendish.com . Website: www.marshallcavendish.com/genref
The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Marshall Cavendish International. PO Box 65829, London EC1P 1NY, UK• Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA • Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand • Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Tan, Wee Cheng.
Hot spots and dodgy places :travels through North Korea, Sudan and distant lands / by Tan Wee Cheng. – Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions,c2009.
p. cm.
eISBN-13 : 978 981 261 969 3 (pbk.)
1. Tan, Wee Cheng — Travel. 2.Voyages and travels. I. Title.
G465
910.4 — dc22 OCN427798416
Printed in Singapore by Craft Print International Ltd
Contents

Acknowledgementshtml
Introduction
"North Korea: Dear Leader’s Flower Show
Come, Celebrate Day of the Sun
The Light of the Great Leader
Who Started The Korean War?
Kim Il Sung Won The Korean War
Electricity for the Great Leader’s Toys
The Weirdest Flower Show on Earth
Whither the Axis of Evil?
The Yalu Bridge Leads to the Future
Western Balkans : Field of Black Birds
Macedonia: Your Name or Mine
Serbia: Dreams Broken & Rebuilt
Srpska: At Odds with the World
Bosnia: Divided Paradise
Croatia: Tragedies on Holiday Coast
Montenegro: Beach Bums & Mountain Warriors
Kosovo: There is No Nelson Mandela Here
Albania: Land of Teletubbie Bunkers
Yemen: Osama’s Desert Manhattan
Libya: Revolutionary in the Sahara
The Sudan: Pyramids & The War Zone
Iran: Many Lands
Iran of Ancient Kings of Kings
Iran of Poets, Wine & Women
Iran of Ayatollahs and Mourners
Lebanon: Eternal Battleground in Paradise
Epilogue
About the Author

My thanks to my many friends scattered across the world who have assisted and advised me during my journeys; those who had accompanied me‘E Kelly Cheng, Gary Choa, Kenneth Loh, Tan Eng Teck and Kris Yap‘E in what otherwise could have been lonely ventures to remote parts of the world. Also thank you to those among my friends who have encouraged me not only in my travels, but also helped to turn this book into reality, in particular, Vernon Voon, who spent many tortuous days reviewing and proofreading the book. And to my parents and sister, who have been most worried for my safety and well-being during the past decade or so of my nomadic wanderings. Thank you, everyone!
While the stories in this book are records of my travels and encounters, certain names and circumstances have been modified to preserve the privacy of those concerned.
All preconceived notions and beliefs concerning cosmology, history, politics and society were made ridiculous by the new discoveries. The world had been opened up by the fanatical self-confidence of visionaries, and had proved to be wilder than their wildest fancies. Now kingdoms were to be had for the taking.
’EW. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century
North Korea, classified as a sponsor of terrorism by the US for most of the last few decades. Seen by the West as a brain-washed state ruled by what the West sees as a reclusive, isolationist dictator who occasionally threatens to nuke all his enemies.
Sudan, seen by many as a religious fundamentalist state ruled by brutal rulers accused of murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
In short, North Korea and Sudan are at the pinnacle of global hot spots, the very opposite of nice, gentle Orchard Road in Singapore.
Why would anyone want to go to North Korea and Sudan?

My first foray to a political hot spot began one morning in late May 1995, in Ljubljana, when I got into a train for Zagreb, capital of Croatia. I was still a novice traveller, on my first journey to Eastern Europe. I had begun my journey in Vienna and gone south to Slovenia. My plan was to make my way to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, skirting around the war-torn mess that was Croatia, Serbia and the other former Yugoslav states further south. In fact, dad, who was getting concerned about my never-ending nomadic inclinations, had warned, “Don’t you step into Yugoslavia. Too dangerous!”
But Zagreb is only 130km away from the cafès of Ljubljana, the idyllic capital of Slovenia, the northernmost of the former Yugoslav states. Slovenia had gotten away free from the clutches of the Serbian generals after a ten-day war in 1991, whereas Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were now bitter battlegrounds. I thought hard about whether to cross the border, but what the heck, a ceasefire had been in force for two weeks . if I didn’t go then, when would I do it?
And so I got onto a quiet train, during which I learned proper Serbo-Croat 1 pronunciation from a Bosnian refugee. Marko, 37 years old, who once lived in Sarajevo but was now a refugee in Zagreb; a jovial fellow whose jokes I only half-understood due to his thick Slavic accent. Even then, it was that one-hour long pronunciation lesson that taught me the finer tones of the Slavic “vic’s” and “j’s”. Marko also reminisced about the green pines and spires and minarets of multi-ethnic Sarajevo, which sparked off dreams of visiting this former Winter Olympic city.
I was in Zagreb for one day; merely two weeks after the Krajina Serbs 2 bombed the city when Croatian forces took over the small Serb region of Western Slavonia in a sudden offensive which was their first major military victory in the war.
The chessboard national flag of Croatia flew everywhere while a band played in the central park. Soldiers patrolled streets marked by massively-fortified garrisons at every corner. Sandbags and barbwire were commonplace. Yet this beautiful near-Parisian city had a surreal atmosphere, as teenagers roller-bladed in the park, and pensioners and lovers strolled along its wide boulevards sparkled with cafès, like people do everywhere else in the world. Little did I know that in less than five months, the Croatian-Bosnian forces would rout the Serbian army, and the war would be over in Croatia and Bosnia.
There weren’t many tourists I only saw one, an African-American who jokingly wondered when the next bomb would fall. The cheapest hotel in town with available rooms was charging US$100 per night refugees occupied the rest, and only diplomats and peacekeepers on expense accounts were in town. I contemplated going south to Dubrovnik but it was too dangerous then. If the ceasefire had broken down, I would have been trapped in a region surrounded by enemy artillery. And so I hopped onto an overnight train to Budapest, Hungary.
Hot spot. A google search revealed a website that defines it as “a place of political unrest and potential violence,” although it is a term that has increasingly been taken to refer to places where one could surf the internet through wireless means.
Why go to hot spots and politically unstable places when there are many safer places to choose from? I have no simple answer to that. Perhaps it was nomadic instincts, or even a distorted sense of romanticism. Or blame it on my DNA´E a great-great-granduncle-multiple-times-removed was known to have departed Hainan Island in Southern China in the mid-19th century for the wild pirate isles of Nanyang, never to be heard of again.
But world affairs, politics, history and economics have always been my passion, and I often dream about the places I read about. Perhaps, I was influenced by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who perished climbing Mount Everest in 1924, who, when asked during an interview with the New York Times in 1923, why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, said simply “Because it is there,” or by St Augustine, the 4th century philosopher and theologian, who said: “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
One would miss out a lot if one completely ignored places in the news, which in any case could be what the great powers wanted you to believe. Iran, despite constantly being accused by the US as a sponsor of terrorism and a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, is to most world travellers, one of the safest and most hospitable countries in the world. Those who are interested in world affairs should discover for themselves the world beyond the thousands of pages of propaganda churned out by the sometimes-biased international news networks.
And it all became so easy after the first hot spot. After that short foray into Croatia in 1995, a whole series of global hot spots past and present followed: Central Asia in 1998, Caucasus in 2000, Colombia in 2002, North Korea in 2004, Yemen in 20